Identification of Induction Motors with Smart Circuit Breakers

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that industrial circuit breakers equipped with sensors can effectively collect data for accurate parameter identification of induction motors, enabling advanced modeling for smart grid applications.

Contribution

It introduces a novel data collection approach using circuit breakers for induction motor parameter estimation, with improved optimization algorithms and experimental validation.

Findings

Circuit breaker data is sufficient for nonlinear motor parameter identification.

The proposed method achieves accurate models comparable to sensor-based data.

Experimental results validate the use of circuit breakers for model-based diagnostics.

Abstract

The problem of estimating the parameters of induction motor models is considered, using the data measured by a circuit breaker equipped with industrial sensors. The measured data pertain to direct-on-line motor startups, during which the breaker acquires three-phase stator voltage and current derivative. This setup is novel with respect to previous contributions in the literature, where voltage and current (and possibly also rotor speed) are considered. The collected data are used to formulate a parameter identification problem, where the cost function penalizes the discrepancy between simulated and measured derivatives of the stator currents. The resulting nonlinear program is solved via numerical optimization, and a number of algorithmic improvements with respect to the literature are proposed. In order to evaluate the goodness of the obtained results, an experimental rig has been built, where the motor's voltages and currents are simultaneously acquired also by accurate sensors, and the corresponding identification results are compared with those obtained with the circuit breaker. The presented experimental results indicate that the considered industrial circuit breaker is able to provide data with high-enough quality to carry out model-based nonlinear identification of induction machines. The identified models can then be used for several further applications within a smart grid scenario.